Improving Multiscreen Services article tells that operators have discovered challenges as they try to meet subscribers’ requirements for any content on any device. Operators must choose from a variety of options for preparing and delivering video on multiple screens. And unlike the purpose-built video networks of the past, in multiscreen OTT distribution there are no well-defined quality standards such as IPTV’s SCTE-168.

For the last 12 years, YouTube’s logo has been a pair of anachronisms wrapped inside each other. “We have the word tube in a tube,” says Christopher Bettig, the head of YouTube’s art department. “This is weird. No one know what this is.” Tube is slang for a television set, which used to be powered by vacuum tubes. But neither tubes nor TVs are central to the world’s biggest video service, which now reaches over 1.5 billion people each month, streaming to almost any screen with an internet connection.

And so today the brand is getting its biggest aesthetic makeover ever. The YouTube logo is being refreshed, shifting the emphasis away from the word “Tube” and onto the familiar play button which has already become an iconic shorthand for the company.

At one time, monitors had more connections at the back or bottom. There was often an old VGA connection, a DVI connection, a DisplayPort connection, and several HDMI connections. Samsung now shows the model with its new professional display. They have only one type of connectivity, type C USB.

Specifically, the USBC is not the only interface of Samsung’s newmonitor monitors. They also feature a DP linking interface that allows multiple display DisplayPort signals to be chained to different screens.

However, physically different connectors will disappear because the USB-C can support different protocols.

Netflix has come a long way since the days when it sounded like a dog food.

When the company debuted 20 years ago today, it was called “Kibble” — and it bore little resemblance to the streaming behemoth it is today. Co-founder Marc Randolph explained that the name was supposed to remind workers how hard it was for startups to survive.

“No matter how good the advertising, it’s not a success if the dogs don’t eat the dog food,” said Randolph.

Today, Netflix has turned 100 million of us into dogs, all over the world.

Under the guidance of Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos and co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings, Netflix jetted past that number of subscribers earlier this year.

Hastings has said the genesis of Netflix was his embarrassment at running up $40 in late rental fees for a copy of “Apollo 13.” The company killed the old way of renting DVDs by delivering them in red envelopes by mail, then reinvented itself again as a trailblazer of online streaming.

Japanese Renesas has introduced its first CMOS-based surveillance cameras image sensor. The company is launching a 8.48-megapixel camera that can be used to carry a 4K resolution surveillance camera.

According to Renesas, the new RAA462113FYL sensor can capture bright images even in moonlight or otherwise in dusky conditions. Thanks to the 4K resolution and the 60 frame refresh rate, you can get accurate videos even when zoomed.

The sensor supports high dynamic range (HDR) dynamics. The cell generates long and short exposure times on separate lines of data.

Here’s a head fake of a story: Apple and Hollywood studios are wrangling over pricing for “4K” movies Apple plans to sell on a new version of its Apple TV box.

Not that it’s not a real story: As The Wall Street Journal reports, the studios want a higher price and Apple wants a lower one. That is: This is the same fight Apple continually has with its media partners, whether it’s music, books or TV channels.

But the bigger story for Apple is that this used to be a fight that Apple would ultimately win, because Apple was the dominant player in digital media. That’s not true anymore.

Apple is pushing for 4K movies because it is adding 4K support

its revamped Apple TV box it will roll out next month. Apple hopes the new capability will help it reclaim market share from cheaper video boxes and dongles sold by Amazon, Google and Roku.

But adding 4K support alone certainly won’t help Apple leapfrog the competition right now, and Apple doesn’t have anything else on tap to help Apple TV stand out.

Apple execs kept trying to get the TV service set up, but couldn’t get the deals they wanted, either — even though competitors, including Dish, AT&T and Google, did.

There are indeed lots of TV apps out there, and a handful of them — like ESPN’s new app that lets you watch four screens at once — take advantage of Apple’s hardware. But that hasn’t been enough to get everyone to buy the box.

The flip side: Just because TV isn’t working out for Apple right now doesn’t mean it won’t be important someday. The company’s next big run at TV should start to show up in the next year or so, as it begins to deploy the $1 billion budget it has earmarked for original shows, produced by a team imported from Sony this summer. Maybe some of those will help move the needle.

Following a tip from Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, local police have confiscated 245 “pirate” media players. The vendor had previously promised to stop selling the devices but while the boxes disappeared from an online store, they were still available offline.

More and more people are starting to use “fully-loaded” set-top boxes to stream video content directly to their TVs.

Although the media players themselves can be used for perfectly legal means, third-party add-ons turn them into pirate machines, providing access to movies, TV-shows and IPTV channels.

Over the past several years, there has been little enforcement effort on this front. However, this changed earlier this year, when the European Court of Justice ruled that selling devices pre-configured to obtain copyright-infringing content is illegal.

When users stream illegal content from an illegal source, rightsholders insist that’s copyright infringement. However, the EU Commission notes that it’s probably not an offense, a stance recently supported by Trading Standards in the UK. Interestingly a High Court judge has just thrown his hat into the ring, stating it’s against the law.

The number of movie tickets sold in the U.S. this summer (425 million) is likely to be the lowest level since 1992, the L.A. Times reports. “Theaters, studios hit by summer box-office blues.” The reason: Too many bad movies, including sequels, reboots and aging franchises that no one wanted to see. Some point to rising ticket prices, which hit a record high in the second quarter.

As Hollywood wraps up the all-important summer box-office season this Labor Day weekend, a sobering reality has gripped the industry.

The number of tickets sold in the United States and Canada this summer is projected to fall to the lowest level in a quarter-century.

The results have put the squeeze on the nation’s top theater chains, whose stocks have taken a drubbing. AMC Theatres Chief Executive Adam Aron this month called his company’s most recent quarter “simply a bust.”

Such blunt language reflects some worrisome trends. Domestic box-office revenue is expected to total $3.78 billion for the first weekend of May through Labor Day — a key period that generates about 40% of domestic ticket sales — down nearly 16% from the same period last year, according to comScore. That’s an even worse decline than the 10% drop some studio executives predicted before the summer began.

And the number of actual tickets sold this summer paints a bleaker picture, with total admissions likely to clock in at about 425 million, the lowest level since 1992, according to industry estimates.

No one can fully explain why.

What is clear: This summer was marred with multiple high-profile films that flopped stateside

People now have more entertainment options than ever, and cinemas have struggled to keep up, despite efforts to adapt with improved technology and services, industry analysts say.

The problem is exacerbated by an unforgiving social media environment in which bad movies are immediately punished by online word of mouth.

Some worry that summer movies have simply lost their place as the top entertainment touchstones American consumers are talking about, as acclaimed shows such as “Game of Thrones” on HBO and “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu dominate the cultural conversation.

R-rated comedies, usually a reliable source of studio profits, also fell on hard times this summer.

some studio executives and filmmakers have blamed Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregated review scores for sinking certain movies before they even hit theaters

Global film revenue — which hit a record $38.6 billion last year — continues to be a silver lining. Certain films have made up ground by doing well overseas after underperforming at home, particularly in China, the second-largest box-office market.

Still, the overseas grosses haven’t been able to completely offset weakness in the United States.

Snapchat owner Snap Inc could soon take a slice of the video advertising pie by taking on TV networks with original content, according to new research.

“Snapchat could see financial success not by necessarily gaining share from Facebook or Instagram but rather by carving out a space for itself as a mobile-first, youth-focused digital video network,” says Brandon Verblow, an associate forecast analyst at Forrester and author of the research company’s latest social media advertising forecast.

The streaming video box company wants to be a streaming video services company. But someone has to pay them for that.

Roku has spent the last few years fighting for your living room against fearsome competitors — Google, Apple and Amazon — and it has more than held its own. Now it gets a payoff, via an IPO.

The pitch to investors: Get a piece of the next generation of the cable TV business, where video programmers who want to reach a huge audience will pay Roku to reach them.

A red flag for investors: Some of Roku’s biggest programmers don’t make Roku any money at all.

Let’s back up. Roku is going public as it moves from a low-margin business — selling video streaming devices — to a potentially high growth, high-margin business — taking a cut of advertising and subscription fees programmers generate using its devices.

First the good news: For now, Roku’s strategy of pushing its prices down has helped it compete against very deep pocketed rivals. In the first half of this year, it saw a 37 percent increase in device sales, led by its $30 Roku Express stick.

That cost its device business — Roku calls it its “player” business — both revenue and gross profits: They are down 2 percent and 28 percent, respectively.

Roku says it’s ok with that. All of those new devices helped its services business — Roku calls it its “platform” business — bump up revenue by 91 percent, while gross profit jumped 104 percent.

Consider: Roku says that Netflix, the most popular video service on its boxes, makes the company next-to-no money. I don’t know if that’s because consumers are signing up for Netflix outside of Roku, so it doesn’t get a cut of revenues, or if the bounty Netflix gives them for sign-ups on Roku’s devices doesn’t amount to much.

Chinese music giant said seeking funds at $10 billion value
Partnering with labels may help secure content deals

Tencent Music Entertainment Group, controlled by China’s biggest social network operator, is seeking new funding at a $10 billion valuation ahead of an initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.

The operator of karaoke and Spotify-like streaming apps plans to sell about 3 percent of its shares to strategic partners, including record labels, one of the people said, asking not be identified as the details are private.

YouTube-MP3, the world’s leading YouTube ripping site, has agreed to shut down indefinitely and hand over its domain to the RIAA. A private settlement agreement, including an undisclosed payment, will end the copyright infringement lawsuit which was filed by several major record labels last year.

With millions of visitors per day, YouTube-MP3.org is one of the most visited websites on the Internet.

The site allows its visitors to convert YouTube videos to MP3 files, which they can then listen to where and whenever they want. The music industry sees such “stream ripping” sites as a serious threat to its revenues, worse than traditional pirate sites.

In an attempt to do something about it, a coalition of record labels, represented by the RIAA, took YouTube-MP3 to court last year.

“Through the promise of illicit delivery of free music, Defendants have attracted millions of users to the [YouTube-MP3] website, which in turn generates advertising revenues for Defendants,” the labels complained.

Today, a year later, both parties have settled their differences. While there haven’t been many updates in the court docket, a recent filing states that both parties have agreed to a settlement.

The details of the deal are not public, but YouTube-MP3 is willing to take all the blame.

Now that you’ve upgraded to a shiny new 4K TV, Sharp has revealed its latest screen to stoke your fear of missing out: a 70-inch Aquos 8K TV. That 8K (7,680 x 4,320) resolution is 16 times that of your old Full HD (1920 x 1080) TV. Sharp calls it “ultimate reality, with ultra-fine details even the naked eye cannot capture,” which doesn’t seem like a very good selling point.

Keep in mind that having a screen with more pixels doesn’t buy you much after a certain point, because those pixels are invisible from a distance — while an 8K panel would be beneficial as a monitor, where you’re sitting close, it won’t buy you much when leaning back on the couch watching TV. HDR, however, is something else entirely, and fortunately, Sharp’s new 8K set is compatible with Dolby Vision HDR and BDA-HDR (for Blu-ray players).

The lack of available 8K HDR content is also a problem. But there is some content floating around; last year Japan’s public broadcaster NHK began the world’s first regular satellite broadcasts in 8K resolution. Sharp also plans to develop more 8K products to form an ecosystem that includes broadcast receivers and cameras.

From early days of the Samsung Galaxy K-zoom, through recent iPhone and Samsung Note8 dual cameras, to the future of folded zoom cameras: the technology evolution explained.

Zoom is a commonly used photography feature; it allows the user to shift smoothly from a long shot to a close-up and vice versa. Optical zoom employs camera optics (a lens) to magnify the object, while digital zoom crops and upscales the input image. Unlike optical zoom, digital zoom reduces resolution and, as a result, diminishes image quality.

In recent years, mobile devices such as smartphones have become ubiquitous. Such devices typically include two compact cameras, a main rear-facing camera, and a secondary front-facing camera. Most compact cameras are designed with the traditional structure of a digital still camera — i.e., they comprise a lens placed on top of an image sensor. The lens focuses the incoming light to create an image of a scene on the sensor.

The dimensions of these cameras are largely determined by the size of the sensor and by the size of the lens.

As smartphone manufacturers are constantly striving to make their products thinner, a compact camera’s height becomes a limiting factor.

This article covers the entire evolution of zoom cameras in smartphones, from early days of the Samsung Galaxy K-zoom, through the latest iPhones and the Samsung Note8, to the future of folded zoom cameras. It also explains some of the mobile photography fundamentals and how vendors strike a fine balance between them.

Apple’s AirPods weren’t exactly hailed a revolutionary, must-have product when they were announced last year, but that hasn’t stopped the wireless headphones from dominating the market. CEO Tim Cook recently admitted that, despite increasing production capacity, Apple is struggling to meet “strong level of demand for AirPods.”

As is the case with the Apple Watch, the iPhone maker has never revealed how many AirPods have been sold since they arrived in December. But according to research firm NPD, over 900,000 totally wireless headphones were sold in the US since the start of the year, and AirPods made up 85 percent of the revenue on those sales.

While NPD doesn’t say exactly how much revenue Apple generated from its headphones (or the precise number of units it has shifted), the AirPods’ $160 price tag means they’re another big earner for Apple.

‘Totally wireless’ is a new segment of the Bluetooth headphone market that refers to products consisting of two wireless earbuds with no connecting cable.

Over a year ago, I wrote about how phone makers were starting to do away with headphone jacks. I’ve seen this unfortunate trend – which I hoped would just be a passing fad – continue to plague devices well into 2017, and it looks like we’re still in danger of losing one of the most essential features our phones have to offer today.

Basically, there’s no consensus among brands, or even within them, about whether it’s a good idea to ditch the jack – but I implore hardware makers to keep it around, for all that is holy and good in the world.

For one thing, there’s no real reason to kill it off. Last year, LeEco’s president of R&D Liang Jun told The Verge that ditching the headphone jack and going USB-C only didn’t impact the manufacturing process, or help the Chinese gadget maker save space in its phone design.

If other brands believe this approach can help them make phones slimmer, I’d like to register my protest against the idea. I’m fine with a device that I can literally talk to, connect to the internet and shoot ultra-high-resolution video with being 8mm thick, thanks very much. If there’s any honest justification at all for killing the jack, I haven’t heard it yet.

Sure, you can use a dongle – but you’re sacrificing functionality because you can’t use the mic and buttons on your remote. You’re also introducing a liability – they’re awfully easy to lose, and it’s not likely that you’ll be able to find one easily while traveling.

As for USB-C headphones – it’s been a while since we started talking about headphones that don’t need the 3.5mm jack, and to date, there are hardly any decent options worth considering, whether that’s Lightning or USB-C. That means you can’t easily use your cheap or expensive headphones with jack-less phones, and you can’t even quickly just plug into your friend’s car stereo with an AUX cable.

It looks like I ruffled more than a few feathers yesterday with my post urging phone makers to stop trying to kill the headphone jack. Xiaomi India’s product lead, Jai Mani, got in touch to share the manufacturers’ side of the story, which is certainly worth hearing to inform yourself about why this debate even exists.

As we chatted on WhatsApp at 7:30AM this morning, Mani explained:

Headphone jacks are actually pretty big. And the common trends in smartphone design are making other components bigger: dual cameras with bigger pixels, big front cameras, smaller bezels, and waterproofing.

It’s difficult to say exactly which components benefit from the removal of the headphone jack, since mechanical design starts after you define the product – but in general, we can certainly use the space it takes up nowadays.

Mani added that he’s gained some insights from customers on the ground, which lead him to believe that buyers care about devices’ thickness and hand feel a lot:

People often say that nobody is asking for thinner phones. I agree with that–you rarely see people requesting it. However, I’ve been spending a lot of time offline recently and design is an important factor in the offline purchase decision. If you ask people to pick up five different phones and tell you which one has the nicest design, thickness/hand feel tends to be the number one deciding factor for them.

Bloomberg:
Sources: Facebook offers labels “hundreds of millions of dollars” to cover infringing music in user-uploaded videos, as it improves copyright flagging tech — Would allow users to legally include songs in uploaded videos — Social network is challenging YouTube as hub for video on web

Facebook Inc. is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, according to people familiar with the matter.

The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn’t have the rights. Under current law, rights holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material.

Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights. Yet such a setup will take as long as two years to complete, which is too long for both sides to wait, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing details that aren’t public.

Hollywood Reporter:
Sources: Amazon and Apple are competing with Warner Bros. and others for rights to the James Bond franchise and are willing to pay as much as the studio — The franchise, and its future, are up for grabs as Agent 007 is being viewed as one of the last untapped brands that could be a game changer.

The BBC is known for producing radio plays, but the format is about to get a high-tech twist: a new experiment by the broadcasting company will turn traditional audio dramas into interactive stories.

One new radio play — a comedy / science fiction story titled The Inspection Chamber — will work similarly to a choose your own adventure book or game. Listeners will hear a chunk of the story, and then be presented with a choice of what should happen next. It was developed by the BBC’s R&D division, which worked with an audio company called Rosina Sound.

The BBC says it has developed a “story engine” that makes it easy to release the same story on multiple platforms, so The Inspection Chamber will be available on both Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices when it releases later this year.

Many years ago, in a rainy concrete jungle on the west coast of Australia, I worked for a medium-sized enterprise doing a variety of office-based tasks. Somehow, I found myself caught up in planning a product launch event outside the official remit of my position. We got through it, but not before the audiovisual (AV) setup of the event turned into one giant hack.

Things came to a head on the night before the event. Working with two different AV teams we had planned for four projection screens and five flat screen televisions spread throughout the venue and controlled from the central AV desk. But somewhere in all those changes the televisions were set up to all display a still image, or nothing at all. I needed to show different videos on each and have the ability to black them all out.

It was at this point I realized we were screwed. The production team simply didn’t have the hardware to drive another five screens, but they could source it — for the sum of $5000. Management were furious

Generally, there’s a few options available in any crisis. One would have been to run around screaming but I suspected that wasn’t going to net me a result. At this point, my brain was running a mile a minute, alternately seething with frustration and trying to piece together solutions. The definition of the problem was simple. I had five televisions, spread across a room. I needed to be able to trigger video with accurate timing, and blank the screen as well, to meet the theatrical requirements of the big reveal on the night. The show was approximately 23 hours away, and I had a budget of maybe a few hundred dollars to get things running.

My first thought was to do it all manually. Hook a laptop up to each screen, and have stagehands hiding behind the screens dressed all in black, triggering the videos at the right moment. I almost instantly discounted this solution, however.

If Only There Were a Method of Connecting Multiple Computers Together

This then led me to realise that if I could instead remotely control the laptops myself, I might be able to pull things together. Cogs began to turn as I contemplated if this was actually possible. I’d need to dredge up five laptops capable of playing 1080p footage, get them all on a network, and find some way of remotely controlling them reliably to both start the videos and blank the screens.

Thankfully, I found the old 24 port HP switch I was looking for and started lacing it up to a couple of the office computers.

Next I had to find a way to run video on the remote machines as seamlessly as possible, and retain the possibility of blanking the screens as well. Once more, luck was in my favour. The company had purchased Dameware remote admin software, which is a slick and powerful tool for controlling other computers remotely. Combining this with VLC on the remote PC, and I could take control over the network, press the spacebar, and start a video playing.

Hurdles still remained. Where would I source five laptops? The A/V company was again of little help, as their computers were all locked down with no way of installing the Dameware client for remote control.

The only thing left to figure out was the network. I could have run it all off the TP-Link wireless router, but given the time sensitive nature of the production, I wasn’t comfortable running on WiFi.
It had to be wired if at all possible.

The night’s rest had granted me one favour — I realised that the same system I was building to control the screens could also control the four projectors I’d been pretending didn’t exist. I just needed another four laptops. Easy, right?

All that was left to do was build the system, and pray it worked.

I sat down at the AV desk with the production team, and began slowly logging into each remote machine. I arranged the nine windows across my screen, ensuring I had the correct video loaded on each one, arranging them so I could trigger each one in succession.

The dilligence paid off. Zero hour came, the music played, and the curtain dropped — and five flatscreens and four projectors joined the dance. Each video triggered in sequence and each screen blanked out when its job was done. The audience applauded, the products were launched, and my career lived to see another day.

Michelle Castillo / CNBC:
Disney CEO Bob Iger says Marvel and Star Wars titles will be streamed exclusively on its new service when it launches in late 2019 — – Marvel and Star Wars titles will be streamed exclusively on the new Disney streaming platform when it launches in late 2019, according to Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Marvel and Star Wars titles will be streamed exclusively on the new Disney streaming platform when it launches in late 2019, according to Disney CEO Bob Iger.
The service will also have original Disney series and movies.

“I have described a very rich, treasure trove of content for this app,” Iger said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2017 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in Los Angeles on Thursday. “We’re going to launch big, and we’re going to launch hot.”

In addition to Disney, Marvel and Star Wars movies, the upcoming branded service will also have four to five original Disney series, as well as three to four exclusive Disney movies, Iger said.

Disney first announced its own streaming service during its latest earnings report in August. As a result, the company said it would be pulling its movies from Netflix starting in 2019. To power the service, Disney bought a majority stake in digital media company BAM Tech, upping the 33 percent investment it made in August 2016.

Microdisplays used in defense, aerospace, and industrial applications are typically based on reflective, transmissive, or transreflective architectures such as liquid-crystal on silicon (LCOS) or digital light processing (DLP). Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and other commercial applications, on the other hand, tend to use active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) technology, usually generating white light with red/green/blue (RGB) colors obtained through color filters.

An emerging alternative microdisplay using microLED technology can be 1000X intrinsically brighter than competing micro-OLED technology. However, its gallium nitride/indium gallium nitride (GaN/InGaN) composition emits in the monochrome blue spectrum around 450 nm, obviating the need for RGB conversion. But traditional means of downconversion, such as the phosphors used in solid-state lighting (SSL), become impractical as pixel sizes shrink. For adequate blue-light absorption, they would need to be 100–1000X thicker to match a comparable direct-bandgap semiconductor, while quantum dot (QD) options need not be as thick, but cannot handle the high optical-flux density of microLED emitters.

Through sharper and more realistic colors, complementary audio and an elevated presentation, our Cinema LED Screen makes viewers feel as if they are part of the picture,” said HS Kim, president of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to partner with Lotte Cinema to bring this technology to theater-goers, and look forward to continuing to shape the cinema of the future.” (Image credit: Samsung)

Samsung Electronics (Seoul, Korea) installed its first ever commercial Cinema LED Screen at Lotte Cinema World Tower in Korea. Designed as a High Dynamic Range (HDR) LED theater display, Samsung says the Cinema LED Screen creates a more captivating and vibrant viewing experience through next-generation picture quality and true-to-life audio thanks to a collaboration between HARMAN Professional Solutions and Samsung Audio Lab.

Using new light-emitting diode (LED) arrays that can both emit and detect light, smartphones and other devices could soon be controlled with touchless gestures and charge themselves using ambient light. Made of tiny nanorods arrayed in a thin film, the LEDs could enable new interactive functions and multitasking devices, as described in the February 10 issue of the journal Science by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, IL) and Dow Electronic Materials (Marlborough, MA).

“These LEDs are the beginning of enabling displays to do something completely different, moving well beyond just displaying information to be much more interactive devices,” said Moonsub Shim, a professor of materials science and engineering at the U. of I. and the leader of the study

YouTube doesn’t have to hand over the IP-addresses of infringing uploaders to a German filmmaker, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt has ruled. The Court argues that IP-addresses can not be used to send a written message to people, so under local law the video streaming platform only has to share their email addresses.

Last fall, a group of music industry heavyweights gathered in New York City to do something they’d mostly failed to do up to that point: work together. Representatives from major labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner sat next to technologists from companies like Spotify, YouTube, and Ideo and discussed the collective issues threatening their industry… The participants of that confab would later form a group called the Open Music Initiative… “Pretty early on it was obvious that there’s an information gap in the industry,” says Erik Beijnoff, a product developer at Spotify and a member of the OMI.

That “information gap” refers to the data around who helped create a song.

Last fall, a group of music industry heavyweights gathered in New York City to do something they’d mostly failed to do up to that point: work together. Representatives from major labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner sat next to technologists from companies like Spotify, YouTube, and Ideo and discussed the collective issues threatening their industry.

And there were many. For decades, major labels have watched record sales nose dive. Meanwhile, streaming services are growing in popularity but drowning in lawsuits. In 1998, the industry reported revenue of $13.8 billion; in 2016 it had dipped to $7.65 billion—and that was considered a good year. “It’s a really fragmented industry,” says Dan Harple, founder of Context Labs and one of the organizers of the meeting. The participants of that confab would later form a group called the Open Music Initiative.

After decades of building distribution channels around record contracts and sales, the micro-transactional nature of the internet has, in some ways, diluted the industry. “I like to make a joke that it’s akin to a FedEx guy who shows up and gets 80 percent of your product price,” Harple says. “To me, that’s in some ways what the App Store does and iTunes does and streaming services do.”

Those might sound like fighting words, but Harple isn’t against digital music.

That “information gap” refers to the data around who helped create a song. Publishers might keep track of who wrote the underlying composition of a song, or the session drummer on a recording, but that information doesn’t always show up in a digital file’s metadata. This disconnect between the person who composed a song, the person who recorded it, and the subsequent plays, has led to problems like writers and artists not getting paid for their work, and publishers suing streaming companies as they struggle to identify who is owed royalties. “It’s a simple question of attribution,” says Panay. “And payments follow attribution.”

Over the last year, members of the OMI—almost 200 organizations in total—have worked to develop just that. As a first step, they’ve created an API that companies can voluntarily build into their systems to help identify key data points like the names of musicians and composers, plus how many times and where tracks are played. This information is then stored on a decentralized database using blockchain technology—which means no one owns the information, but everyone can access it.

Think of it as a standardized set of liner notes. Keeping track of this metadata means artists and platforms can leverage it various ways without fear of violating rights. “What this API is allowing is real time access to information,”

Kodi doesn’t just have to worry about add-ons and devices that give it a reputation as a piracy haven. The media center app developer has revealed that it’s battling “trademark trolls” who’ve registered the Kodi name as their own and are using that mark to profit from software that’s supposed to be free to distribute. The culprits may charge you to host Kodi on a website, for example, or make you buy their Kodi boxes instead of others. And this isn’t a theoretical worry, either.

The team points to the example of Geoff Gavora, who registered the Kodi trademark in Canada and promptly used that to boot devices off of the country’s local Amazon store. Now, anyone who wants to buy a Kodi box from Amazon in Canada has to either spring for Gavora’s hardware or hope that someone is willing to pay him a fee to make their own. You don’t have to turn to Amazon if you want to buy or build a Kodi box, but this still limits your choices.

The Kodi developers aren’t embroiled in any lawsuits “so far,” and they note that a few trademark holders gave up their claims under the pressure of existing piracy lawsuits.

“The environment needs innovation to meet our greenhouse gas goals,” Duncan told us. In contrast, today’s average car burns a full tank of fuel every year, just by transporting its mirrors, Duncan added.

Automakers know this, which is why many are experimenting with mirrorless concepts. In 2016, for example, BMW showed off its i8 Mirrorless concept, which uses two small cameras in aerodynamic holders, and a third mounted on the rear windshield. Images from the cameras are projected on a high-res display suspended from the front windshield. In a press release, BMW declared, “Dangerous blindspots have been consigned to the past.”

Automotive supplier Continental AG has also developed a system for replacing exterior and interior mirrors. The system uses three cameras inside the vehicle, along with two monitors that display rear and side views of the vehicle. The company claims that the system provides a wider field of vision and better visibility in poor light and rain. It also eliminates the problem of damaged exterior mirrors and reduces road noise, Continental said.

Government Approval Needed

Still, government approval is needed in order for automakers to take the concepts to production. In 2016, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) approved the Cadillac CT6’s “hybrid” display from Gentex Corp. , which combines a mirror and camera, but it has yet to bless a complete mirrorless design.

The Raspberry Pi is an incredibly versatile computing platform, particularly when it comes to embedded applications. They’re used in all kinds of security and monitoring projects to take still shots over time, or record video footage for later review. It’s remarkably easy to do, and there’s a wide variety of tools available to get the job done.

However, if you need live video with as little latency as possible, things get more difficult. I was building a remotely controlled vehicle that uses the cellular data network for communication. Minimizing latency was key to making the vehicle easy to drive. Thus I set sail for the nearest search engine and begun researching my problem.

Native MJPEG Streaming — If Your Network is Fast

Gstreamer is the Swiss Army Knife of Streaming

While some Raspberry Pis do have hardware H264 encoding on board, I’d prefer to start with a native stream for maximum performance. I’ve ordered a 1080P camera that uses the Pi camera interface, and I can’t wait to start experimenting.

Apple has just unveiled a long anticipated upgrade to its Apple TV set-top box, which is now capable of playing movies and TV shows at 4K Ultra HD resolution. Tim Cook said TV is at an “inflection point” with the mainstream adoption of 4K. The new Apple TV hardware puts the company on equal footing with Roku, Amazon, and Chrome, all of which already offer devices capable of 4K streaming. The latest Apple TV will be available on September 22nd for $179 with 32GB of internal storage or $199 with 64GB. Preorders start September 15th.

In addition to 4K, Apple is embracing HDR with this latest Apple TV with support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10. These high dynamic range technologies allow for brighter highlights and an expanded range of colors on television sets that also have HDR. The difference can be striking — sometimes even more so than the jump in resolution to 4K.

Apple is now selling and renting digital 4K movies via iTunes, in addition to its HD and SD resolution versions. The addition of 4K content, which you can stream as well as download, is mainly designed to support the new Apple TV, which supports 4K HDR output for the first time. Plus, if you bought HD versions of titles for which 4K HDR is available, Apple is automatically upgrading them for free.

This is a key piece of Apple’s incentive puzzle for getting users to upgrade to a new Apple TV, as it means there will be a strong content pool that users can access right away. Apple will also be able to take advantage of 4K streaming content provided via Netflix, which has offered both 4K and HDR streaming on other platforms for a while now, and Amazon Prime Video, which is finally arriving on the platform as previously announced.

Ben Fritz / Wall Street Journal:
Apple has signed deals to sell movies in 4K with every major Hollywood studio, except Disney — Apple TV will offer Hollywood movies in the high-resolution format, called either 4K or UHD, for ultra-high definition — Apple Inc. AAPL -.40% has signed new deals to sell movies …

The rise of online streaming services such as Netflix and HBO Go has dramatically altered the media habits of Americans, especially young adults.

Overall, 59% of U.S. adults say cable connections are their primary means of watching TV, while 28% cite streaming services and 9% say they use digital antennas. Among the other findings of the survey:

Women are more likely than men to say their primary way of watching TV is via cable subscription (63% vs. 55%).
Men are more likely than women to say their primary pathway is online streaming (31% vs. 25%).
Those with a college education or more are more likely than those with less education to say their primary way to watch TV is online streaming. Roughly a third of college-educated Americans (35%) say they mainly watch via streaming, compared with 22% of those who have a high school diploma or less.
Those in households earning less than $30,000 are more likely than others to say they rely on a digital antenna for TV viewing. Some 14% say this, compared with just 5% who live in households earning $75,000 or more.

“Definitely not an action camera”. The Sony RX0 features a 1-inch sensor, ZEISS 24mm lens and the S-Log2 picture profile.

We get hands on with the tiny Sony RX0, which includes many of the features seen in the RX100 series of cameras with the same high-quality image from the 1-inch, 15.3 megapixel sensor. The menu system will be familiar to Sony users, with the ability to change exposure settings, picture profiles, and even add markers to aid in the video framing and composition. It shoots in HD up to 60p, with HDMI out for external 4K recording.

Multiple cameras can be mounted together and controlled simultaneously through the Sony Wireless Commander

Cory Doctorow / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF says it’s resigning from W3C after the standards org voted for browser DRM, a move hostile to archiving, accessibility, security research, more — In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” …

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry body that oversees development of HTML and related Web standards, has today published the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification as a Recommendation, marking its final blessing as an official Web standard. Final approval came after the W3C’s members voted 58.4 percent to approve the spec, 30.8 percent to oppose, with 10.8 percent abstaining.

EME provides a standard interface for DRM protection of media delivered through the browser. EME is not itself a DRM scheme; rather, it defines how Web content can work with third-party Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that handle the proprietary decryption and rights-management portion.

The development of EME has been contentious. There are broad ideological and legal concerns; some groups, such as the Free Software Foundation, oppose any and all DRM in any context or application. Some do not object to DRM, per se, but are concerned by regulations such as the US’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under the DMCA, bypassing DRM is outlawed, even if the bypass is intended to enable activities that are otherwise legal.

As computer vision and object recognition technology continue to mature, we’re edging closer to automating away the exceedingly boring task of monitoring closed circuit TV cameras. Matroid is one of the startups leading the democratization of this variety of machine intelligence. The company is announcing a $10 million Series A this morning from NEA and Intel Capital that brings Matroid’s total financing to $13.5 million.

In terms of commercialization, founder Reza Zadeh is focusing on the security and media markets for now. Fortune 500 companies will pay to monitor when their brands and key executives are featured on TV channels (check out Face-O-Matic for a political example of this). Meanwhile, other businesses will pay for a system to play the role of CCTV monitor, observing camera footage for long periods of time and flagging abnormalities for reference.

Matroid is building inroads inside the hardware ecosystem to implement its technology.

“Eventually all cameras will have some ability to understand what they’re looking at,” Zadeh explained to me in an interview.

Zadeh is leveraging his connections as a Stanford professor to build a community around Matroid. His Scaled Machine Learning conference brought together researchers from Google, Intel, NVIDIA and OpenAI, among other companies and institutions.

Stock imagery service Videoblocks made its name thanks to its flat-rate, unlimited video library and a marketplace that paid photographers a 100 percent commission. Over time, the service started branching out beyond video, though, and the company first announced its plans for a stock photo service earlier this year. Now — after having gathered and indexed millions of images from its first crop of photographers — the service is opening up to the public.

With this, the company now offers a stock photo marketplace, a stock audio service and a graphics marketplace, on top the flagship video service.

Storyblocks says that it now has 10 million images in its new photo library and that it’s adding about a million per month.

At IBC2017 in Amsterdam, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is showcasing networking solutions such as segment routing for delivering multiplay services, including video to any screen. Cisco is looking into the possibilities for segment routing with IP video service deployments to evolve to “video-aware networking.”

Segment routing is intended to help video operators simplify how the network and applications adjust to real-time data. It is designed as a flexible, scalable way of doing source routing, where applications, including video, can determine their own paths in the network.

Benefits of segment routing for video include:

Simplifying IP network configuration and management, reducing traffic engineering time and errors
Scaling the delivery of diverse services with automation that can programmatically apply application-level requirements to the network
Delivering quality-assured video experiences without having to expend additional bandwidth

At IBC2017 in Amsterdam, ARRIS (NASDAQ:ARRS) will unveil a new portfolio of UltraHD HDR set-top boxes with Android TV, along with professional services to help operators launch Android-based video services.

ARRIS’ set-tops with Android TV are modular in architecture and intended for cable, telco, satellite and terrestrial operators. Based on Android TV Operator Tier, they offer WiFi connectivity and DVR options, as well as support and integration with DVB networks, and conditional access and DRM.

ARRIS’s support services for Android TV include:

Assessing and planning for Android TV services
Customization and integration: development of operator-specific launcher and apps, integration of content security and back-end systems
Validation and certification: with Google and other third-party applications
Deployment support: across both new and legacy set-tops
Lifecycle management: integration, management and testing of mandatory Android updates a

With Google’s user-generated content loophole firmly in lawmaker’s sights, global music trade body IFPI has published new research looking at demand for music streaming.

The research confirms YouTube’s pre-eminence as the world’s de facto jukebox. 46 per cent of on-demand music streaming is from Google’s video website. 75 per cent of internet users use video streaming to hear music.

The paid-for picture is bullish: 50 per cent of internet users have paid for licensed music in the last six months, in one form or another, of which 53 per are 13- to 15-year-olds. Audio streaming is split between 39 per cent who stream for free and 29 per cent who pay.

The cost of distribution rights for every major televised sport in the United States is more than the ad revenue TV channels get from airing those sports, according to Magna’s latest Media Sports Report.

Why it matters: We are quickly approaching a tipping point in which traditional TV providers will no longer be able to justify the cost of carrying sports.

Magna analysts say they “don’t see the ever-increasing gap between ad revenues and rights fees as sustainable in the long term.”

This economics are especially problematic for broadcast networks that carry live sports games, because they don’t have access to subscription revenues to subsidize the high cost of programming, like cable networks do. Broadcasters rely on ratings, driven by viewership — which is getting increasingly older and aging out of the coveted 25-54 marketing demographic, as well as retransmission fees

As a result, more sports distribution rights have migrated to cable networks

John Eggerton / Broadcasting & Cable:
US regulators approve Disney’s acquisition of majority stake in BAMTech, which will be key in Disney’s planned launch of an ESPN-branded streaming service — Will provide platform for ESPN and Disney branded OTT — The federal government has signed off on Disney’s purchase of a majority stake in BAMTech …http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/feds-ok-disneys-bamtech-buy/168773